


The Domino Effect

by Valentine20xx



Category: Ranma 1/2
Genre: F/M, New Techniques, Ranma's Smarter Than He Looks
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-12-06
Packaged: 2020-08-11 06:27:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20149144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valentine20xx/pseuds/Valentine20xx
Summary: On a slow Summer's day, Ranma, out of complete boredom at his situation, decides to find something to do.That began what was likely one of the most surreal series of events in his life...





	1. A Day Of Boredom

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [A Day Of Boredom](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/505225) by Pixelwriter1. 

> Disclaimer: Ranma Nibbunoichi © Rumiko Takahashi. Original storyline concept © Pixelwriter1. Only the latter is used with permission.
> 
> The original story this is based on was a semi-abandoned story by one of my favourite authors, posted during a hiatus period from their main story, Desperately Seeking Ranma. While DSR was kickstarted by Ranma discovering the fledgling ‘Sisterhood Of Doom’, this one was kickstarted by Ranma just being so damn bored, he got experimental. And that’s where the fun began.  
Considering the average length of a chapter for Pixelwriter1 is 10-15 thousand words, and my typical chapter size is around 3-5 thousand, clearly this story would have been multiple chapters when posted. I have shorter chapters, but will try to keep the flow of the story consistent.  
Obviously, the title ended up fairly inaccurate, but so did DSR’s. I’ll keep the original title for the first chapter, then move to my own chapter names.

“So BORED!” A male voice called out into the lazy summer day, no-one listening, “Bored, Bored, BORED!”  
It wasn’t hard to see why no-one could hear him, as Ranma was sunning himself on the roof of the Tendo family home in the early morning, everyone else out on various errands and activities. School had only been out for a few days, and he’d been looking forward to the break from the chaos that was part of his everyday life. However, the problem was that everything seemed to have ground to a halt, and he found himself with an unusual situation, namely having nothing to do for a prolonged period of time.  
None of his ‘girlfriends’ were currently chasing him, which he’d initially considered a gift from Heaven, with Akane pointedly simply ignoring him at the moment, which was vastly preferable to to normal, borderline abusive relationship he found himself in with her. He had been on the verge of giving up taking and rolling with the mallet strike that he’d expected, but, oddly, all she’d done was stomp off in a huff and leave him completely alone. Not that he minded.  
Since then, all she’d done was glare at him a lot, but, outside of mealtimes, she normally just left the room when he came in, or pretended he didn’t exist at all. While it did upset him that their relationship had soured to the level that she’d rather not talk to him at all, he preferred being ignored to the mallet strikes and accusations of infidelity that came from the usual meetings he had with his supposed future wife. Right now, he doubted they’d ever get married, and it was all thanks to a cask of water.

When it had become apparent that Akane had been complicit in what was effectively the theft of the precious, at the time, cask of Jusenkyo water, by effectively allowing it to be made a ‘wedding gift’, he’d spent the best part of a week feeling real hatred for someone for the first time in his life. Over the following months, it had cooled to just mere annoyance, his positive outlook on life not allowing him to hate her for very long, which was the only reason the engagement even lasted as long as it had.  
However, he no longer trusted her. He still wanted to have her around, as a friend kept at arm’s length, but he no longer had any wish to marry her. A relationship like that was built on trust, and she obviously, from the beginning, had no trust of him, claiming he was being unfaithful if he spent more than 30 seconds longer than some mandated time period out of her sight, while the lost cask had ruined what little trust he’d had in her. There was no foundation for them to ever be partners.

With his other engagements, Shampoo and the other two Amazons had returned to China for some tribal business, which would keep them away for at least two to three more weeks, if not longer. She'd seemed upset to leave, although he had been quite pleased. Still, to keep her happy, he'd made all the right noises. Again, while he could see one day perhaps being a friend, he had no real attraction to the girl despite her undeniable beauty and skill, purely since he knew he’d be required to train the Amazons in his art, while taking the fall if challenged.  
What didn’t help was that she was much too pushy and sexually aggressive which made him very uncomfortable at the best of times. He knew his attitude to sex and innuendo was somewhat unusual for a young man, or woman, his age, but that didn't mean he wasn't affected by it. He just had vastly better self-control than the majority of people and didn't like having it shoved, literally, in his face all the time. Add in Akane’s very public declarations of infidelity every time she smashed his face into her chest… Wasn’t going to work, ever.

Ukyo had gone home to visit her father and would be away for the next week. She at least he could talk to, although her blind insistence that the best thing that could happen to them both was for him to marry her and then run a chain of Okonomiyaki restaurants proved beyond doubt that she didn't really know him very well. Or at least didn't think much about his own wants and needs. It was a pity, because he did like the girl despite everything, although once again he couldn't see that they had a future together.  
Both Kuno siblings had been taken off to Hawaii by their insane father, which was a gift to the entire area. Ranma was by no means alone in feeling that the less Kunos around the better. They varied from insane to very insane and were dangerous with it. Kodachi was again a very good looking and quite skilled young woman, but she gave him the creeps at the best of times, and the howling horrors most of the time. The further away from her he could get the better. Sometimes he felt that Mars might be about the right distance.  
He hadn't seen Taro for months, which was a massive relief, or Ryoga for a couple of weeks. The lost boy was always good for a decent sparring match at least, but his constant blaming of Ranma for everything wrong with his own life got rather wearing after the first hundred or so times. The collateral damage he caused whenever he popped up was a damn pain in the rear as well. Ranma usually got the blame as he was normally the only one around to get shouted at since Ryoga would wander off and vanish after pretty much every fight.  
Added to that, Happosai had gone away for the summer, stating that he wanted to try the beaches of Europe for his collection of ‘silky darlings’, Ranma suspecting it was more that he’d not been there for years, and the statute of limitations on whatever got him kicked out had expired. Either way, Ranma snorted to himself, he pitied the Europeans. They were in for a really bad season.  
His mother and father had gone off for a while, his mother gently and politely insisting that his father should accompany her for a shopping trip. When politeness didn't work, she found waving an extremely sharp sword at him did. They'd left quite early to catch the train into the centre of Tokyo and would be away for a couple of days. Soun was taking the unusual lack of Genma as an excuse to go and cheat at Shogi with some old friends. He probably wouldn't return for hours. Most likely being carried back by those same friends as he would be falling down drunk.

Even Nabiki seemed to be leaving him largely alone at the moment. She seemed to be involved in some complicated scam that would probably bring near-ruination to a number of her peers. He wasn't happy about how she behaved but had decided some considerable time ago that it was best if he stayed out of her business whenever possible, if only to keep his own life less complicated. Not that it actually was, but he didn't want to add anything to the normal chaos.  
He just quietly dealt with the occasional fallout from one of her schemes going bad, when it seemed that violence might erupt. He wondered idly if she had ever realised how many times he'd intercepted someone bent on causing her physical harm. It seemed unlikely. For the last couple of years, every time he'd warned off a potential problem, he'd made a note of when and why, just in case it came in handy one day.  
Snickering, he had the sudden thought that he should give her the list, along with a suitable invoice for the protection work. That would probably make her pop a gasket if anything would. The pair of them had been getting along fairly well for the last few weeks. He suspected a certain amount of guilt over her actions surrounding the wedding had made her back off slightly.  
Once she started treating him more like a human being rather than a profitable play-toy, she'd apparently started to see him as someone she could at least be civil to. He could go along with that. He'd always rather liked the middle sister, despite her mercenary ways, largely due to a considerable respect for her mental acuity. She was very attractive as well, which helped quite a lot.  
Several times he'd thought perhaps he should arrange some photos of her like she had taken of his girl form, just to see what she'd do when it was _her_ dealing with the illicit gravure photographs. It would probably be short, messy and expensive…  
For everyone, except Nabiki and, of course, himself, who was involved.

Kasumi he got along with very well. Quietly, in the background like always, she had helped him on a large number of occasions with everything from homework to explanations of female hygiene when that had become necessary a year or so ago. Not the sort of thing he'd ever have expected to know about, but his unusual circumstances of being both male and female, albeit on a time-share basis, left him with problems that none of his peers would be likely to understand. She at least didn't judge him for it, just calmly explained the issue and the resolution of it.  
He was extremely grateful to her and even more grateful that she'd never mentioned any of it to another soul. Recently she'd also been teaching him to speak more maturely, something he'd had trouble with. He was making a conscious effort to sound less like an under-educated hick and more like an intelligent person, an effort which seemed to be paying off. He still found himself dropping back into slang-filled language when he was annoyed, but overall the last two or three months had brought about a startling difference in his speech patterns.  
Akane teased him unmercifully about it, at least until she stopped talking to him completely. That was at least one positive effect of the silent treatment.  
The three sisters had gone out together and wouldn't be back until late evening. He'd taken the opportunity to relax, but had found as the day wore on that somewhat unexpectedly he had started to become bored. Smiling up at the clouds he wondered when he'd become so much of an adrenaline junkie that he couldn't go one day without a fight or argument. He certainly didn't like such things, although there was nothing like a good fight to stir the blood, but he'd never thought he would actually miss the action quite this much.

'Not like I've ever had the chance to miss it,' he thought to himself with a wry grin. 'This is probably the first time in nearly two years I haven't had a fight of some sort.'  
Sitting up he ran through his memories carefully, then raised his eyebrows. 'Good grief. I've had a fight of some sort every single day for years! That can't be good.' He mused, staring out over the rooftops he wondered at the course his life had taken and shook his head, adding, mentally, 'Well, better make the most of the quiet time. It's not likely to last.'  
Stretching widely, he stood up and walked to the peak of the roof, looking around at the scenery. "Still bored," he muttered. After a moment he shrugged, ran towards the other end of the roof, and jumped across the road. Bounding from rooftop to rooftop in a manner that anyone from outside the environs of Nerima, which was after all a very odd place, would find highly implausible he spent the next hour working up a good sweat in exercise. He wasn't going anywhere in particular, just bouncing around with excess energy.  
Eventually, he ended up in a large park near the edge of the ward, one he seldom visited, he jumped from the roof of the last building into a large tree and sat down on a branch some ten metres up, looking out over the park. There was a large lake in the middle of it with some row-boats slowly moving around on it and a few people wandering around or sitting having picnics. He found it a little odd how few people there were on such a nice day, but realised after a moment that in all probability most people had gone to the beach for that same reason.  
A figure in the middle distance caught his attention, it was a middle-aged man who was walking slowly across the grass waving what appeared to be a long stick with a loop on the end back and forth. Ranma watched for a minute or so, wondering what on earth the guy was doing, then decided to go and find out. Dropping lightly to the ground he apologised to the young couple who were kissing at the base of the tree, who he surprised quite badly.  
Walking towards the man a few hundred metres away he got about half-way, then groaned as a small child chasing another equally small child with a pump-up water gun nearly as large as he was managed to catch him in the crossfire. Both children stopped and stared at the buxom young red-head who was standing on the grass dripping and mumbling to herself, then looked at each other and shrugged, before running off. Ranma grumbled, adjusted her clothes, and went on to her original destination. A few people who had seen the change rubbed their eyes and decided that they must have imagined it. Ranma was used to the reaction. It was horribly common in Furinkan, surreal martial arts techniques being as common as earthquakes. When she arrived near the man she stood a few metres away and watched carefully. The stick with a loop turned out to be some sort of electronic device, which at the top had a box with a meter and several controls. There was a set of headphones plugged into the box which the man was wearing.

He was carefully waving the loop back and forth a couple of inches off the ground in wide overlapping arcs, stopping every now and then to adjust one control or another. She wondered what the point of this slightly odd activity was. About to walk over and ask him, she stopped when he suddenly froze, then moved the thing back and forth over a small area of ground, adjusting the controls very gently. Her extremely acute hearing picked up a whistling noise coming from the headphones. The man smiled, put the device down, then knelt. Pulling a small digging implement from his pocket he dug up a divot of earth about ten centimetres on a side, putting it to one side of the hole.  
Picking up the machine again he held it over the hole, then the lump of earth he'd removed from it. The whistle came back when it was over the removed lump. He smiled again and began to break the lump up with his fingers, apparently looking for something. Ranma walked closer and watched with interest. After a few seconds the man made a noise of triumph, picking a small glittering object from the displaced earth. She could see that it appeared to be a ring. The man took his headphones off and held the ring up to the light with a broad smile.  
"How did you do that?" Ranma asked curiously and he jumped, not having realised she was there. Looking over his shoulder at the interested young woman he raised his eyebrows for a moment, then smiled.  
"This is my metal detector," he explained, pointing at the device lying on the grass beside him. "It can find metal objects hidden under the ground. I come out here every now and then and walk around for a few hours, trying to find anything valuable that someone might have lost." She nodded, understanding the idea.  
“So you’re treasure hunting?” She asked, and he smiled back.  
"Well, kind of. This is the first decent find I've made in weeks. Normally it's just bits of rusty metal, small coins, garbage like that. But it gets me out of the house and gives me an excuse to get a bit of exercise. And there's always the off chance I'll find something worth money, like this." He rubbed the dirt off the ring and held it out to her. "It's reasonably good quality gold, I think. Not worth a huge amount, but there might be a reward for it. I'll see if the police have had something like this reported as lost. If no-one claims it for a few weeks I can keep it."  
Carefully putting the earth he'd removed back in the hole he replaced the turf and prodded it back into position, then stood. Nodding to her he put his headphones back on and resumed sweeping the metal detector back and forth over the ground. Ranma watched for a while, then walked away, thinking. Reaching the trees near the edge of the park she sat down under one, leaning back against it and closing her eyes.  
'That's pretty cool. I wonder how it works?' she thought. An idea had been sparked, which needed further examination. Ranma Saotome started doing something that many people who knew her didn't believe happened, although it did quite often. She started to think very hard. The part-time girl was actually pretty smart, in fact genuinely brilliant when it came to anything that might in any way smack of martial arts. Which in the end, due to the unique way her mind worked, almost everything did.  
She just didn't see a lot of point in advertising the fact, which in some ways proved how bright she was. And, with how bored she was, just slightly poking at the thought of treasure hunting had got the gears going in her head. And that was the start of something completely new...

She knew that she could do all sort of interesting things with ki. Since the Saffron incident she'd tried, whenever possible, to practice building up and manipulating her ki, and the results had been a steady increase in her reserves of life energy. Along with that her ability to sense it had increased enormously, she could easily pick out the specific signature of people from a considerable distance now. For a target with large ki reserves such as another martial artist she didn't even have to try, they stuck out to her like a beacon.  
More normal people took a little deliberate work, unless they were quite close or meant harm. Animals took more concentration still. She hadn't thought before of using this ki based sensing on non-living things before, but seeing that man with his metal detector had given her a curious idea. Was it possible to replicate the effect? Presumably the machine sent out some sort of energy and read the results. Ranma was vaguely aware of the process of sonar, from a mention at school. She decided that she needed to look up how things like that, and such things as radar and metal detectors, actually worked.  
It had been apparent to her for a while that she had a grievous lack of knowledge of technical subjects and should probably do something about it. Deciding that some experimentation was in order, she closed her eyes and began some meditation exercises, quickly slipping into the half-trance where she'd discovered she could deal with ki operations most easily. Calming herself, reaching for her centre as if she was practising a new technique, she opened her mind to the ki field surrounding her.  
The various people in the immediate vicinity stood out brilliantly against the dim background ki emanations from the environment. Stretching her senses she targeted one person about fifty metres away, inspecting him curiously. It was obviously a man, she could feel the male ki coming from him. Looking more closely she saw he was either asleep or extremely relaxed. With some practice she found she could feel his heartbeat and respiration from the small fluctuations in his ki emanations, and even feel his emotional state. He was relaxed, nearly asleep, and contented. And hungry. She smiled, thinking ‘Weird, but interesting...’  
Turning her attention away from him she felt out further, counting twenty-three people within about one hundred and fifty metres. Further out there were more, but she ignored them, she'd proven the point. The ki sensing was actually pretty easy when you knew the trick. Widening the search she deliberately blocked out all the humans in the area, finding it surprisingly easy to do. She was still aware of them but they sort of faded away as unimportant. Once they were blanked, she noticed that there were a large number of smaller individual ki sources, which had been drowned out by the human output.

After a moment it became apparent that these must be animals of various types. The ones above her were presumably birds. There were ones in the trees and the grass as well. Mice, more birds, and one that made her eyes snap open and her heart race when she realised it was one of those furry meowing demons. She looked wildly around for a moment, before coming to the conclusion that it was a safe distance away and moving off. Sweating, she breathed heavily for a while trying to calm herself enough to go on.  
'I hate those things,' she thought, then slowly closed her eyes again. It took several minutes to calm down enough to re-enter the trance and get back to the same point she had been before the monster walked past. Slightly pleased that she'd managed to keep it together so well, she probed deeper, blanking out as many of the animal sources as she could. The background ki field had dimmed hugely, but as she pushed her mind, she could see it get brighter and differentiate into a vast number of tiny threads of life energy, with a few much larger ones.  
These must be plants, obvious as one of the large ones was immediately behind her. Turning her attention to it she inspected it curiously, distracted for a moment by the complexity and size of the thing. It was beautiful in a way, a huge but delicate tracery of light in a colour that didn't exist outside her head. After marvelling at it for a while, she turned her attention outward again.

Ranma spent nearly five hours spreading her ki sight over the park, zooming in on things that caught her interest at various points. She learned how to focus down to an individual insect at a considerable range, several hundred metres at least, or how to spread the sense over a large area and see everything at once. After some practice she managed to do it with her eyes open, the result being a weird overlay on top of normal vision, every living thing within range glowing that indescribable colour. It took a bit of concentration to maintain, but the effect got easier the longer she practised.  
Once more her inhumanly steep learning curve came to her aid, compressing an activity that would have taken a normal adept at ki manipulation, if there even was such a thing, weeks or months into hours. Eventually she leaned back against her tree and sighed. The exercise, as fun and interesting as it had been, had shown one thing conclusively. It didn't show non-living things. So much for that. Even so, it had opened her metaphorical eyes to the possibilities of the technique and she could already see some very useful combat applications, aside from the near-xray vision it produced for living creatures.  
She could track a person from hundreds of metres away regardless of anything between them and had rapidly discovered it was becoming a reflex to keep a small amount of her attention on the human signatures within a certain range. A slightly larger amount of time was spent for scanning for demonic furry little bastards, which was a skill she thought would stand her in good stead. She could at least sense them coming and get out of the way before one arrived. There would be no surprises from them now, so that was a very useful outcome of the last few hours.  
However, it hadn't resulted in a useful answer to the question she'd originally posed. Pulling a hundred-yen coin from her pocket she flipped it into the air and caught it, over and over, while thinking the whole thing over. Perhaps she was going about it wrong?  
  
At the moment she was basically listening for, or looking at, the emanations given off by life. Ki was essentially derived from life after all. It stood to reason that an inanimate substance, unless it was a very odd one, would have no emanations of its own, not being a living thing. So, logically, one couldn't sense what wasn't there to sense. Assuming all that was true, how could one get around that. Could one get around it at all? Unwilling as always to accept that there was something she couldn't do, she decided to try another approach.  
Rather than passively reading the ambient ki, what would happen if she sent out her own ki and tried to read anything that came back?  
It was worth a try, she decided, then flipped the coin into the grass a couple of metres away.  
“Right. That's the target. I know it's there, I can see it. But can I sense it?" She stated, then closed her eyes and slipped easily into the practice trance, before feeling in front of herself for the coin. There was no trace of it in a passive scan. With a mental shrug, she sent out a small pulse of ki in the direction of the coin to see what would happen.  
The result was somewhat unexpected. All the life signs in the path of the pulse out to several dozen metres brightened abruptly, although very slightly, then very slowly dimmed down again.  
"Huh. That was weird," she mumbled to himself. The plants and insects seemed to have absorbed a very small amount of her ki, making them slightly more 'alive' for want of a better word. She'd never have noticed it if she hadn't had all the practice in the last few hours in reading ki signatures, it was an extremely subtle effect.  
It was interesting, but not immediately useful. Trying again, she sent out a different pulse. Again, there was a small increase in the life energy radiated back. It felt slightly different this time, reflecting the change in her pulse. Over the next hour or so she tried dozens, if not hundreds, of minor changes to the ki she was sending, and was beginning to get disheartened. When the return pulse finally came from the coin it was completely unexpected and she nearly missed it.  
'Hey. What the hell was that?' She wondered, and tried the last pulse again, this time expecting the tiny return from where the coin was.  
'Wow. It works,' she thought triumphantly. Refinement of the technique took another couple of hours. Small changes in the 'shape' of the ki pulse, the intensity, and various other parameters she couldn't even describe made large differences in the amount of signal she got back from the target coin. In the end she settled on two ki bursts, one which seemed to get a return from anything metal, and one which seemed to be specific to whatever the coin was made of. This led to some interesting possibilities. Presumably each material would have a specific detection pulse, so she could distinguish between them. That could be useful.

To test her idea she looked around for some different type of metal to try, then sighed. All she had to do was send out the generic metal detecting one with more power. The result was confusing, there seemed to be a huge number of metal objects all around her, out to any range she cared to try. Some were quite large, and corresponded to things she could see, like lamp-posts, benches, and so on, while others were smaller, down to very tiny sizes.  
The middle of a park in a city as old as Nerima was obviously not the ideal place to do this, there must be an enormous amount of metal lying around from hundreds if not thousands of years of civilisation. Again, considerable effort led to yet another refinement, allowing a lot of the extraneous signal to be ignored. In the end she could filter out all the small stuff that was too omnipresent to be useful, leaving only the larger results, similar to her coin and up in size. Sure enough, she found that the generic pulse showed, for instance, the lamp-post twenty metres to her left, but the one specific to the coin didn't.  
A slight change and she had one that showed the post but not the coin. It seemed likely that this would work for any specific metal. This brought the thought that she needed to learn more about chemistry. She only had the vaguest idea about elements, knowing that everything was made up of one or more of them, but not knowing how many there were or how many were metals. Practising some more she found she could also tune the effect to show stone, or wood, or in fact practically anything. It was actually very odd.  
Closing her eyes and sending out a rapid sweep of all the pulses she'd so far worked out, she found she could build up a remarkably detailed map of the immediate vicinity. Putting more power into it let her 'see' things nearly a kilometre away. When she focussed the energy into a tight beam in front of her she was getting returns from much farther than that. She opened her eyes and looked around, a wide grin on her face. It was evening now, the park was emptying out, but she felt she'd spent the day well. An entire new technique had opened up in front of her, one she'd never even heard of before.  
It would take a lot of practice to do it easily, but she knew she'd get there pretty fast. Soon enough it would be second nature. The scanning for life signs was already pretty much habit. Standing she stretched hugely, picked up her coin, then walked slowly out across the park, pinging the area around her with a detection pulse restricted to about twenty metres. Heading for the exit on the far side of the park, by the time she got there she'd located and picked up nearly two thousand yen in lost coins, a watch, two unrelated earrings, a pen, and three keys.  
It looked like, if nothing else, this would be an effective way of making money, if only by finding all the small coinage that people lost. She turned one of the earrings over in her fingers, it seemed to be quite high quality and made largely of gold judging by the weight. Using it to practice on she added another specific pulse to her library, this one for gold. She decided that she needed to find samples of as many different things as possible so she could tailor detection pulses for all of them. Perhaps a visit to a jewellery store was in order.


	2. Chapter 2

****Halfway home she stopped to buy herself a 'well-done, Ranma' present at the ice-cream place, paying for it with a large number of small denomination coins. This didn't impress the young man behind the counter over-much, but she made up for it by putting on her well-practised cute girl act, which made him nearly swoon and press another bowl of ice-cream on her. Smirking, she ate it with relish, then went on her way.  
A few hundred metres from the Dojo she realised she could sense the presence of the three Tendo sisters and their father from much further away than she normally did unless she was trying. All that ki sense work had really paid off in increased sensitivity. Akane stood out like a lighthouse, her ki reserves were considerably larger than anyone else in the house. The incessant strength training did have a result other than huge amounts of crushed concrete blocks.  
Soun was next in intensity, then oddly enough Kasumi. Nabiki trailed behind at some distance, although even her ki output was considerably larger than most people who were not martial artists. Jumping onto the roof of the house from across the street she looked around with her newly enhanced ki vision, noticing that she could essentially see the people in the buildings around her right through the walls.  
Not like a normal image, it was a little like the effect she'd seen on the TV of a thermal camera in use by fire-fighters, although only a little. She could tell that Nabiki was in her room, Akane was in the living room, Kasumi in the kitchen as usual, and Soun in the bathroom. With a little effort she pinged the house and could see all the wiring in the walls, the pipework, and pretty much all the metal objects in the entire house.  
"Weird," she mumbled, grinning again. "But I like it."

Dropping into the garden she went into the house, greeting Kasumi in the kitchen before sitting down in the living room. Akane looked at her, scowled, then turned back to the television, ignoring her from that point on. Ranma sighed very slightly, watched a few minutes of TV then got up again. Walking back into the kitchen she leaned against the table and watched Kasumi preparing the evening meal.  
"How was your day, Kasumi?" she asked. The oldest sister glanced at her with a smile, then went back to slicing vegetables.  
"Very nice, thank you, Ranma. We did a little clothes shopping, Nabiki bought a really nice swimsuit, then went and saw a movie. Akane got a couple of books and I found some decent knives to replace the ones that..." She trailed off, looking slightly guilty.  
"That Akane ruined last week," Ranma said with a small grin. The eldest Tendo woman nodded, flushing a little.  
"Yes." She kept her voice down, not wanting Akane to hear. Ranma looked towards the door into the living room, then back at Kasumi. The same method he’d used on the man earlier told him Akane’s emotions hadn’t even wavered.  
"She didn't hear you." Ranma offered, satisfied. Kasumi looked relieved, then curious.  
"Why are you a girl at the moment?" she asked, looking at the red-head again. Ranma shrugged, moving to the sink, then she tested the water before beginning to wash some of the plates stacked in it. Kasumi watched with a smile, then nodded her thanks.  
"Ran into a little kid with a water gun this morning in the park. I couldn't be bothered to change back at the time, I ran out of hot water for my thermos and forgot to refill it. Then I got distracted by a new technique I came up with." Ranma offered.

Finishing the dishes she drained the sink, then pulled the thermos in question out of ki space, unscrewed the lid, and refilled it from the hot tap. Putting the lid back on and stashing it away again she stuck her hand under the hot water then turned the tap off. Loosening his clothes slightly to make it more comfortable he began drying the dishes.  
"It hasn't seemed to bother you as much recently," Kasumi observed. He shrugged again.  
"No, it doesn't." He checked to make sure none of the other inhabitants of the house were within earshot before continuing. "I can't honestly say I like it, but I don't dislike it either. Over the last few months I've come to realise it doesn't really matter to me very much whether I'm male or female, at least most of the time. One form has advantages and disadvantages that the other one doesn't, they kind of balance out in the end. The bit that pisses me off is the randomness of it more than anything else. And the way people insult me about it."  
Kasumi studied him for a while with an amused expression.  
"You're the only person I've ever met who can speak with authority on the way men and women are basically the same," she said with a chuckle. He grinned.  
"Oh, there are lots of differences, but one isn't better than the other, despite what dear old Pop says. Just different. At least physically. Mentally, well, I still find women very strange." Ranma began, Kasumi laughing, very amused by it.  
"It took me a long time to overcome a lot of what the old man said about women being weak. It's obviously wrong, though. Just look at all the women in my life. I couldn't point at any one of them and honestly say they were weak, or less able than a man. Physically less strong, yes, in some cases, but even that isn't completely true. Just look at Akane. She could unscrew the head of practically any man who wasn't a martial artist. Shampoo is a lethal warrior, Nabiki can think rings around most people, and so on." Ranma finished.  
Kasumi listened to him with a smile, while he finished drying the cutlery and put everything away, then went back to leaning on the table.  
"So what is your new technique?" she asked, picking up the cutting board and pushing the chopped vegetables off it into a large bowl, before starting another batch.  
"Like I said, I was in the park earlier. I saw this guy walking around with this weird machine..." He explained the event and what had come of it.

"Only you, Ranma, would even think of something like that. Never mind actually manage to do it." She said quietly as he finished, for him looked proud, making her giggle before adding, "So what are you going to use it for?"  
"Don't know yet. It was just an interesting idea which ended up working much better than I thought it would. Being able to sense people so easily and from such a distance could be very helpful, at least I can avoid those damn Kunos more easily. And Ca.. Ca.. those furry things." Ranma said, almost stammering the last part, She smiled sympathetically at his inability to even get the word out, Ranma then remembering something as he added, “I did find a hell of a lot of things in the park though...”  
He dumped the remaining coins and all the other detritus he'd found on the table and stirred it around. She looked at the pile with interest. Picking up the pen she inspected it carefully.  
"This is a nice pen. May I have it?" He smiled.  
"Help yourself. If I could figure out who it belonged to I'd give it back, but that seems unlikely, there doesn't seem to be anything much very memorable about it." He stated as he picked the earrings and keys out of the pile and put them to one side, "I'll drop these in to the police and see if anyone is looking for them. These _are_ going to be memorable..."

Dinner that night was quiet, Akane doing her best to pretend it was only her, her sisters, and their father, talking over him whenever he tried to say anything. In the end he gave up, just eating his meal in silence, acknowledging the sympathetic glance Kasumi gave him with a small smile. Even Nabiki looked a little worried at the way Akane was treating him. He glanced at her and shrugged slightly, making her raise an eyebrow for a moment, then nod to him. After the meal he helped clear the table, before going and sitting on the roof again, looking out into the night.  
His relationship, if you could call it that, with the youngest sister seemed to be steadily going downhill. There didn't seem to be much he could do about it and after careful thought he came to the conclusion that he didn't much care. Possibly, one day in the future, they might develop the sort of trust for each other that would allow a genuine relationship to occur. While that was something he wasn't averse to, he wasn't expecting it to happen either. At the moment he had no real interest in marrying anyone. It seemed unlikely he could ever develop a relationship with anyone outside the circle of lunatics he was stuck with.

He was also rapidly losing patience with his mother. Her constant harping on about manly activities was really getting up his nose. He wasn't entirely sure what she meant by that and had come to the conclusion some months ago that neither was she. There was some sort of ideal man in her mind, one that had probably never existed, one that he was damn sure he couldn't be.  
Moreover it was one he didn't want to be as it seemed to hinge around being some sort of sexually aggressive playboy stud, which sounded pretty unpleasant to him. He was female often enough that he'd developed a hearty dislike for the sort of man who acted the way his mother seemed to expect to a woman. More than once he'd had to re-educate a man of that type while female, and a couple of times while male.  
The attitude really irritated him, and more than one man who had been planning to get a score with the exotic young redhead had ended up in the hospital or the local police station. Nowadays, she actually dropped the rapists off at the station. He previously had dropped them at the hospital after the beating.  
The fact that his father seemed to have spent the last ten years or so trying to mould him into that sort of person had pissed him off horribly when he'd finally realised it a year or so ago. Find out later that his mother was apparently complicit in that action, and in fact desired it, had made him furious. Even though he loved both of them as parents, a lot of the time he didn't like either one of them as people. Sooner or later it was going to come to a head and he was going to have to stand his ground. He had the feeling that that time was fast approaching.

Deciding that dwelling on this was just a depressing waste of time, he stood up and closed his eyes, feeling around himself with his new technique. He rapidly built a ki map of the area out to a hundred metres or so, walking around on the roof and watching how he could make out things even hidden behind other things. It was rather disorienting for a while, more like something from an arcade game.  
After a while he opened his eyes and tried mixing normal vision and this weird active ki sight, finding that the result was even stranger, but oddly easier to handle. His eyesight, which was considerable better than most people could ever manage, struggled with the dark, but the ki vision filled in the gaps. The end result was startlingly clear, not quite like normal vision but letting him see as well as if it was daylight, although with several extra effects.  
Some practice allowed him to fine tune it a bit, so he stopped inadvertently looking through things. It was quite disturbing to look at the roof and essentially see right through it as if it was translucent glass. After half an hour of practice he decided to throw caution to the winds, and took a run at the end of the roof. Jumping across the street, trusting to his new sense, he found he landed on the neighbouring roof as easily as if it was normally lit.  
With a broad grin he started moving faster. He was soon bounding across the rooftops as fast as he did during the day. When in a fit of enthusiasm he closed his eyes before the next leap, he found that he needed to calibrate the sense a little better, as he missed the roof by about three metres, his trajectory taking him straight into the wall below it, slamming into the brickwork of the two-story building before he slid down it into the alley below with a stream of profanity trailing behind him.

Lying on the ground in a puddle of something unsavoury he stared up at the night sky and muttered for a moment, before levering himself to his feet. It was a good thing he seemed to be practically indestructible nowadays, he thought to himself, with ki reinforcing his body, or that would have really caused some damage.  
Brushing off the worst of whatever he'd landed in he jumped back onto the roof from a standing start, then tried again, more cautiously this time. It took an hour or so and three more misses before he was confident enough that he was moving at full speed with his eyes closed.  
Giggling slightly manically to himself he bounced from roof to roof, thinking that this was a technique as good as anything he'd ever heard of. And it was all his. This was not going into his father’s playbook. He might teach it to _his_ students, but only on the really advanced classes, and more than likely, those students would be his children. Most likely adopted. He knew far too much about how children happened, thank you.

The next day, after a couple of hours of doing katas, he waved goodbye to Kasumi and headed for the nearest park. It took about an hour and a half to scan the entire thing, at the speeds he could easily manage. By the end of it he had a couple of kilos of coins totalling over nine thousand yen, as well as several small items of jewellery. Grinning to himself, while privately astounded by how much people lost, he went to the nearest police box and handed in the jewellery, giving his details in case no-one claimed it. He stashed the coins away and headed for the next park.  
By the time his parents came back, he'd cleaned out every park in Nerima and was casting his net further outwards. The local police were slightly overwhelmed by all the lost jewellery, watches, and so on that the odd Saotome boy, and sometimes girl, handed in. They were privately wondering what on earth was going on, although they couldn't doubt his, or her honesty. That evening, three days after he'd invented his technique, he sat in the Dojo and counted up all the coins he'd found. It came to nearly fifty-eight thousand yen.  
Separating the various denominations of coins out into different bags to be taken to the bank the next day and changed into notes, he smiled to himself. The new ki vision technique was proving to be a very effective and easy way to earn money. It was practically second nature by now. He'd become used to walking around and looking at the world as if it was slightly translucent and was wondering why he'd never thought of it before. It was so easy once you knew how. What he didn’t think of was that he understood ki like most people understood breathing.

The next morning brought an unwelcome attempt by his father to fling him out the window into the koi pond, as per normal practice. Genma was rather startled when his attempt, for the first time, completely failed. The boy, even though apparently still asleep, neatly avoided every attempt to lay hands on him, even from behind. Still scratching his head about it, Genma eventually gave up and went down for breakfast, deciding he'd try again later. Ranma woke up some time later at Kasumi's call, wondering absently why he wasn't both wet and female, as he was used to waking like that.  
Shrugging, he got up and got dressed. Thank heavens for small favours. This set the pattern for the next week. By the end of it Genma was getting very annoyed and extremely puzzled. It didn't seem to matter how sneaky he was, he couldn't get to within striking range of his son without the boy noticing and taking evasive action. Ranma had worked out that he was doing something out of the ordinary after the first couple of days, and why. Deciding it was much funnier to continue on in the same vein, he pretended not to notice the increasingly elaborate attempts by his father to ambush him, just walking around them as if they didn't exist.

His ki vision was running continuously now and he was completely used to it. It made any attempt to lay a hand on him pretty much pointless as he could always sense the blow coming, even from behind. When Akane stopped her silent treatment and took a swing at him with her mallet from behind over some imagined insult, he avoided it without apparently even noticing, bending down to scratch his ankle at exactly the right moment. The errant mallet continued on its trajectory through the space his head should have occupied and made a large hole in the wall, making Nabiki sigh and start working out the cost of repairs, and Kasumi smile slightly.  
She was the only one other than Ranma aware of what was going on and found it extremely funny. He quirked a slight grin at her, which none of the others noticed, then quickly left the room while Nabiki and Akane were shouting at each other over who would pay for the repairs and whose fault it was. Akane blamed Ranma, of course, while Nabiki for once took his side. After all, she had seen her sister swing the mallet apparently deliberately into the wall. It had come nowhere near the pig-tailed boy.

Ranma was wondering when his father would think to try the umisenken cloaking technique on him. He was quite curious as to what the result would be. So far the older man didn't seem to have considered it. With a smile he left the house and headed out for the next park on his list. By now he was up nearly one hundred and fifty thousand yen and had a pretty large roll of notes stashed safely away. The amount of lost valuables he'd turned in to the police dwarfed anything they'd ever seen. He'd had a number of very curious policemen and women ask him how he was doing it.  
His explanation, given without a trace of a smile, of Martial Arts Lost Property Location, caused all the police inside Nerima to nod sagely, and all the ones outside to look at him as if he was insane. The fact it was, in a way, completely and utterly _true_ was not mentioned. By the end of another week his father was going slightly strange from his continued failure to even get close to hitting his son, while Akane was almost foaming at the mouth.  
She'd tried to mallet him for increasingly unlikely reasons, in the end just to prove she could, missing every time. He normally didn't even notice, as far as she could see, moving out of the way just in time for some completely coincidental reason. Nabiki was getting extremely annoyed at the ongoing cost of repairs and Kasumi seemed to have to leave the room in a hurry quite often.  
Ranma had followed her into the kitchen at one point to find her leaning on the table silently heaving with laughter and grinned at her. As the only one in on the joke the eldest sister felt quite privileged, in turn Ranma found he was seeing a side of the young woman he'd never encountered before.

When she finally stopped laughing she stood up and wiped her eyes, grinning back in a most un-Kasumi-like manner, in that it was not the forced, and very obvious motherly ‘fake’ smiles that she used so often, and had fallen into the habit of keeping plastered on her face. This was a genuine, full-blown grin.  
"Thank you, Ranma. I haven't had so much fun in years," she whispered to him, not wanting anyone else to hear.  
"You're more than welcome," he quietly replied with an amused look, before heading out on another treasure hunt, as he thought of his trips. He was up to over a quarter-million yen now, but was starting to hit a point of diminishing returns, as he was having to go so far afield from the Dojo that he could only do one or two parks a day. All the nearer ones had been swept clean.

Absently thinking that perhaps he should try the beach, he was heading home when a very familiar ki signature popped up on his senses a few hundred metres away.  
"Aha. Ryoga. I wonder where you've been," he said out loud, for once a little pleased to see the lost boy. Heading towards him he wondered about the way that his rival had apparently simply appeared out of nowhere. He'd always wondered about the fellow's ability to get lost in a room with no doors, but for the first time began to wonder just how he did it. He hadn't seen a trace of Ryoga approaching, but suddenly there he was. Deciding that this bore further investigation, he bounded across the rooftops until he was close to his rival although out of sight of him.  
Concentrating on his ki vision and ignoring normal sight, he followed Ryoga on the other side of the roofs for a few hundred metres, stopping in surprise when he disappeared as suddenly as he'd come…

...which was impossible.  
"What the...?" he managed, wondering if he'd made a mistake. Casting his senses further and further afield, he resorted in the end to rotating like a lighthouse, 'looking' in a very narrow range to as great a distance as he could.  
"Ah, got you," he said happily, then frowned. Ryoga was at least five kilometres away. How had he managed that trick?  
Shrugging, he headed in the right direction as fast as he could. He arrived seconds before the part-time piglet vanished once more.  
"Damn it. How the hell is he doing that?" Again, he scanned the area. This time he found his rival quite fast, only a couple of kilometres away. Dashing across the rooftops he arrived in an implausibly short time. This time he followed the other young man from much closer. Concentrating on him to the near-exclusion of anything else, he watched as once more Ryoga vanished, turning a corner that wasn't there and disappearing in front of his ki vision.  
'That's weird,' he thought, going over what he'd seen. 'Very weird. It was like there was a really short burst of peculiar ki, that reminds me of something for some reason. Then he just... vanished."

Scanning carefully around, he once more located Ryoga, a few kilometres away to the east. Once more he bounded off in that direction, arriving a few seconds before the lost boy was once more gone. Knowing what to look for this time, he studied the odd distortion in the ambient ki field that was slowly vanishing. Abruptly he realised why it seemed familiar.  
'It's like a strange combination of the ki inversion from the umisenken and a ki fold from the hidden weapons technique. Like he used his ki to fold space, but in an odd way, all twisted out of shape.' He was aware that at the same moment that Ryoga had disappeared from in front of him, he'd reappeared on his ki sense a couple of kilometres away behind him, with no apparent delay. Dashing over he dropped to the street and followed the lost boy from a dozen or so metres back, watching intently.

Ryoga stopped to buy a snack from a street vendor, then went on his way, shadowed by the pig-tailed martial artist who was concentrating on him so hard that it made people who noticed slightly nervous. Walking into an alley the fanged youth got about half-way down it before once more apparently going around a corner that wasn’t there. Ranma stopped dead and stared at the resulting distortion of ki, which was fading as he watched, trying to work out what was going on.  
Walking closer he moved around the point in space from which Ryoga had left, wondering what the trick to it was. He was not to know what that would bring him next...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish to do a shout-out to PataHikari.  
They do have a really good head on their shoulders about some of the problems the Ranma fandom has, although they _really_ need to understand that some aspects of fanon do have a place in the Ranma canon.
> 
> Unlike Harry Potter, where some weeks, _**Word Of God**_ has no place in canon.


	3. Thinking With Portals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wish to remind people that the base story is still Pixelwriter's. I have broken it up into chapters and tweaked a few things, but the basic narrative is still their's.  
Once I get past the part that was already written, I will start on my own slant. But I will let people know when that is.

Ranma looked thoughtful as he considered what he’d just seen. The nearest thing he'd heard of to what he'd seen was some form of teleportation, but as far as he knew that required a very large amount of magic. He'd seen portals before, which was another possibility, more than once he'd had to fight some demon or other coming through one, normally a result of Happosai doing something stupid, but that wasn't it either.

He considered what that weird magical girl he'd bumped into once did, seeming to somehow move from point to point without using all the intervening points, but that was the result of some artefact and seemed to require a remarkably long wind-up before she could do it. Ryoga seemed to be doing this without even realising he was doing it, based on his constant complaints of never knowing where he was.

Scanning the area he discovered that the other boy had moved far enough away that he couldn't sense him any more and shrugged. He'd be back sooner or later, he always turned up, normally when he was least wanted, another thing that was predictable as hell about Ryoga. He could find Nerima… but only when Ranma didn’t want him to.

Turning his attention back to the ki distortion, which was still present although much smaller, he pondered it for a long moment, before very carefully trying to duplicate the energy signature and feed it a little power. Nothing happened the first couple of times. He studied it closely for a moment while scratching his head. Trying again, he found it suddenly absorbed the new variant of ki and jumped back into existence.

Walking around it, looking at it intently, he realised that to normal vision there was absolutely nothing there. Glancing around he spotted an empty beer bottle, picked it up, then gently tossed it towards the distortion. He blinked a few times in shock then looked for something else to throw. Another bottle, half a brick, a few balls of newspaper, and several coins followed each other into the distortion. None of them dropped to the ground, each of them vanishing without a sound.

"Holy shit," he mumbled, flipping yet another coin into the point in space that seemed to eat things with an odd expression on his face. After a long moment he managed to suppress the almost overwhelming urge to walk through it and see where it went. Knowing Ryoga it could be anywhere from a few kilometres away to the other side of the planet, at least based on some of the places he claimed to have visited. Judging from some of his wilder stories, another planet entirely wasn't completely impossible.

A sudden thought struck him and he hastily jumped back onto the roof and dashed towards where the last place Ryoga had vanished from was, dropping down into a vacant lot a couple of minutes later. Looking around he found the distortion was still present, but on the verge of fading away completely.

Feeding it a little power in the correct manner he watched as it jumped back into existence, smiling triumphantly. He knew exactly where this one went. Cautiously testing it with a small pebble, he took a deep breath and walked forward, surprised despite himself when he suddenly and with no fuss found himself standing on another street two kilometres from where he'd started.

"Fuck me," he muttered, looking around in amazement. Even though he'd pretty much expected it, the reality of the sudden displacement in space was a bit much to take in. Walking unsteadily to a nearby wall he sat on it and stared at the place he'd appeared. No one seemed to have noticed anything unusual, which puzzled him a little.

With a slight shock he noticed that several passers-by had walked through the point in space that the end of the conduit, or whatever it was, occupied. There was no apparent effect or reaction. Pulling a coin out of his pocket he flipped it at the distortion, which was gradually shrinking again, and watched as it bounced off the pavement a metre past it.

After thinking for a moment, he tried feeding a little energy to the effect and saw it expand again. Holding the feed constant he tossed another coin and saw it vanish.

'Interesting. It only works while it's being powered. I guess that makes as much sense as anything about this does. It doesn't need much power either, I could keep this open all day and not even feel it. Even Kasumi has enough ki to power it. How on earth does Ryoga manage to do this without even realising it?' Ranma mused. Ryoga effectively bumped into them constantly.

Getting up he walked over to what he was starting to think of as a doorway and after a moment's hesitation stepped through it, finding himself back in the vacant lot he'd started from. 'So they work both ways. That's useful to know. Next question, how do you target one to a particular place? Or, more importantly, how do you make one in the first place?'

He experimented with the spacial door for some time, walking back and forth through it and watching what happened to the ki around it with curiosity and interest. The really weird bit, once you got around the entire concept in the first place, was that no one seemed to notice. He decided in the end that part of the odd ki surrounding it must have some sort of cloaking effect, making people just ignore it.

That would at least explain why generally nobody ever seemed to think anything odd was going on when Ryoga appeared or disappeared. It seemed likely that if he'd never developed his new ki senses he'd never have noticed himself. He found himself wondering about the whole chain of events resulting from meeting a man with a metal detector.

After a lot of investigation, he was beginning to get some idea of what was happening, although not how. It seemed that his first guess was actually fairly accurate. The effect seemed to be a variation on the hidden weapons technique of folding space using ki, but essentially folded two points in space together into one, two points that could be a significant distance apart.

When something went into one end it immediately came out the other, as for all intents and purposes they were the same place. As far as he could see the transition took no time at all. He couldn't see or feel any effect other than an extremely small and subtle twitch in the ki field. He didn’t even fall out of step.

He had no direct evidence what the distance limit was, if it actually had one. Standing in the vacant lot he went over the ki pattern of the end of the link that he was standing next to, trying to work out how to duplicate the effect. The thing seemed to require little energy but considerable delicacy as the pattern was very complex. Stepping through it and looking at the other end, he compared the two patterns.

Going back and forth a few times he noticed that the majority of the pattern was the same at both ends and slowly realised that it was possible that this was the part that set the whole thing up. Which might mean that the remaining part was in some way responsible for setting where it was aimed. It seemed plausible but he needed a larger sample size.

Going back to the alley he poked around but found that the remains of the link there had faded away completely. Sighing, he realised that he was going to have to wait for Ryoga to turn up again before he could look into this any more. He returned to the link he'd been playing with and reopened it, going back and forth a few more times to get the base pattern firmly in his mind.

Eventually he popped out at the end nearest home and headed slowly back to the Dojo, thinking furiously. If he could master this it was an even better technique than the ki vision, or at least on a par with it. When he jumped over the gate and walked into the house he smiled absently at Kasumi and Nabiki, who were sitting in the living room talking, and even at Akane when she came in. All three of them looked at each other, the expression on his face was very odd.

"Something on your mind, Saotome?" Nabiki asked curiously. He looked at her for a moment then nodded.

"Yep. Found something really odd today. I'm trying to figure out how it works."

Akane snorted at him disparagingly and Kasumi looked at her with mild disapproval. "Don't be rude, Akane."

Her sisters both looked at her with slight surprise, but after a moment turned back to Ranma, who had his eyes closed and was waving his hands slowly around in front of himself, as if he was trying to feel something invisible in the air. Everyone watched him for a moment, puzzled, until he opened his eyes and raised an eyebrow.

"What?" he asked. Nabiki sighed.

"You are a very strange person, Ranma." She inspected him curiously for a few seconds, then asked, "So what did you find?"

He stared right back, a weird expression on his face, before abruptly grinning in a remarkably predatory manner. Holding out his hand he said, "Sixty thousand yen."

She stared at him in shock, while Kasumi stifled a sudden urge to laugh wildly. Akane looked back and forth between the pair of them, wondering what was going on. Nabiki looked at him with her eyebrows raised so far they were at risk of going back down the other side, for once unable to think of any comeback. After a moment the martial artist winked at Kasumi, got up, then left the room.

All three of them watched him go with various expressions, until Nabiki turned to her sisters and asked in a stunned voice, "What the hell just happened?"

Akane shrugged, while Kasumi merely looked at her with a slight smile.

At dinner that night Nabiki and Akane were both watching Ranma as if he might suddenly explode, although for different reasons. Nodoka was watching them watch him with a certain amount of curiosity, while Genma was still trying to figure out how his son avoided him so easily nowadays. He was no closer to working it out and it annoyed the hell out of him.

As the meal came to an end, he stood, stretched, and made a sudden grab for the boy who was looking away. Ranma casually ducked even before he fully committed to the manoeuvre and as a result Genma managed to poke Akane in the ear with his finger. She immediately exploded in anger and swung a mallet at Ranma, who once more wasn't where she expected to find him.

The follow through on the strike spun her in a complete circle and as she staggered sideways she clouted Genma on the side of the head with the mallet. He fell over, not being prepared for the blow, and in the process kicked the underside of the table, making a glass of water leap into the air and disgorge its contents over Ranma, who grumbled in irritation.

Kasumi was watching the whole thing with bright eyes, trying not to burst out into laughter, while Nabiki was snickering at the expression on the red-head's face, not to mention Genma and Akane, who both looked furious with each other and Ranma. Nodoka merely sighed and exchanged glances with Soun, who shrugged helplessly. The entire thing was over in less than a minute.

Getting to her feet Ranma wiped the water off her face and helped Kasumi clear the table, glaring at her when she giggled a little. After a moment she began laughing herself and in the end they were leaning against each other in the kitchen howling with laughter. Nabiki and Akane leaned in the doorway and watched for a moment, before simply shrugging and leaving again.

Ranma and their older sister were both in dangerously weird moods at the moment and it was probably safest to steer clear for a while. When the meal had been cleared up, Ranma walked back through the living room, still chortling to herself, glanced at Akane and grinned, before wandering out into the garden and jumping up onto the roof. The two youngest Tendo women looked at each other and shook their heads, before Nabiki turned on the TV, hoping that things would return to normal eventually.

"Your son is acting very strangely at the moment, old friend," Soun commented gravely. Genma nodded, exchanging glances with his wife.

"That he is. I have no idea what's going on."

"I'm not sure it's very manly," Nodoka commented, which made everyone in the room look at her for a moment wondering once more exactly what she meant by that. There seemed to be no good response so in the end no one said anything.

Up on the roof Ranma lay down and looked up at the stars with a slight smile on her face. Thinking back to that day nearly three weeks ago she snickered. Total boredom had led to a remarkable new technique, completely by accident, and in turn that technique had led to the possibility of something even more interesting.

"There's something to this education idea," she said softly to the night sky, thinking about all the knowledge she'd realised she needed learn to make the best of the ki sense. Her mind was difficult to kick into action on learning anything abstract that didn't seem to have a martial arts use, but once it fired up was like a turbine-powered vacuum cleaner, sucking up everything at a frightening rate. In the last week she'd read all the chemistry textbooks she had, memorising the contents with ease now she had a use for the information. It turned out to be very helpful, allowing her to tune the ki sense very finely, working out what things were made of to a level of accuracy that would have amazed an analytical chemist.

She didn't really have any idea how incredible what she was doing really was, in fact, never having thought about it. It was just another application of ki, although a very interesting one. A mental list of other things to try was being added to on a nearly daily basis. She'd also decided that a trip to the library was in order, to begin research on more details on chemistry, and other things that might be useful. The potential tactical applications of abstract knowledge had hit late but hard.

A few days before she'd visited a jewellery store, as a female for appearances sake, and spent an interesting hour or so going over as many different precious metals and gems as possible while building a library of ki pulses specific for them. She already had gold and silver due to things she'd found during her treasure hunting expeditions, but with the unwitting help of the young salesman had added platinum, iridium, titanium, diamond, sapphire, ruby, and a host of other gemstones. She had found that several of them were very difficult to distinguish from each other. It had taken her some reading of the chemistry books to learn why, but in the end she discovered that ruby and sapphire, for example, were actually almost exactly the same chemically, the colour being due to traces of different elements. This was something she'd never even considered before.

Turning her attention back to the puzzle posed by Ryoga and his weird method of travelling, she once more went over the complex ki pattern in her head. She could visualise it clearly enough, but attempting to understand it was proving to be difficult. In the end she decided that there was nothing else she could do without seeing more of the distortions left when he jumped around, which would have to wait for the next time he turned up. That could be tomorrow or weeks away. The guy was unpredictable at best.

Sitting up she swept the area for anything interesting, noticing a couple of furry demons moving off a few hundred metres to the west, making her shiver a little. The increased sensitivity of her ki sense was a mixed blessing at time, she'd suddenly found out just how many of the little bastards there were running around the place. There was almost always one or more of them within range, although she could at least avoid them now. She'd slowly learned a certain amount of self control, finding that her tolerance for them seemed to be adequate as long as they were at least fifty metres away and out of normal sight. In that case she could stand it, although the closer they were the more tense she became.

Pulling out her cash stash she looked at it. There was a very thick stack of yen notes in her hand, one that would probably give Nabiki a small orgasm. The thought made her grin. Counting it carefully she realised with slight shock it was now up to over three hundred thousand. 'I'd never have thought that so much money gets dropped,' she thought. She'd found literally thousands of coins in the last two weeks or so, not to mention the rings, watches, and the like. There was a good chance that quite a lot of that she'd get back in time as well if the police couldn't trace the owners. She'd already collected half a dozen minor rewards for several wedding rings, and one set of keys.

Separating the cash out she bundled it up into twenty-five thousand yen rolls using some elastic bands, then stashed it away again. Noticing that Nabiki was now in her room she grinned, walked across the roof, dangled over the edge and tapped on the middle sister's window with her finger.


End file.
